Topological Meditations

To the infant’s developing mind, topology comes before geometry. In general, deeper and more fundamental logical operations are developed earlier than more specific rules and applications. The history of mathematics, which is generally taken as a process of moving towards deeper and more general levels of thought, could also be thought of as a process of excavation which attempts to uncover the earliest operations of thought in infancy. According to this argument, the very first operations exist at a pre-conscious level [i.e. ‘pre-intellectualizing’ level in the conscious and intuitive infant] so that the more fundamental a logical operation happens to be, the earlier it was developed by the infant and the deeper it has become buried in the mind.” – F. David Peat,

My feeling is that ‘topology’ plays an important role in shaping our understanding of ‘realty’, yet it is IMPLICIT in the language we use, helping to shape our understanding UNCONSCIOUSLY.  For example, we commonly employ the word GROWTH as if it refers to a reality, but the ‘growth’ on some thing (e.g. a town) on the surface of a sphere is NOT POSSIBLE since the concept of ‘growth’ is innately incomplete in its failure to capture the simultaneous reciprocal shrinking of the undeveloped land.  Only if the growing town were on a plane of infinite extent would the term GROWTH (which is one-sided in that refers to the thing-in-itself that is ‘growing’) be appropriate.  In the case that the surrounding undeveloped land is shrinking by the same amount the town is growing, we would have to use a terms like TRANSFORMATION rather than GROWTH to capture this.

Such understanding is in the realm of TOPOLOGY and while we are born with this tool of understanding at the ready, … it is, in our WESTERN CULTURE, soon ‘trained out of us’ as we are taught language which orients us to name-instantiated things-in-themselves.  This is the realm of GEOMETRY rather than TOPOLOGY and as is the thesis explored in this note, the reduction of TOPOLOGY to the GEOMETRY OF THINGS, is a WESTERN CULTURE CRAZY-MAKER.

If you have ever been in a ‘psychiatric ward’ undergoing therapy, you may have been exposed to an exercise in which you are given a piece of absorbent cotton-batten and a smooth surface hardboard for you to ‘paint a picture on’.  However, in this case, while the hardboard is white, it has been covered with a fresh coat of blue paint so that it is uniformly blue.  A you begin to remove the blue with the cotton-batten, white cloud-like shapes appear which are very aesthetic and comforting.  This exercise is remind you of the calm, peacefulness of our natural open aware condition that lies beneath the intellectual chatter of calculations and worries in our mind that it would do us well to be to access whenever we wanted to.

Sometimes, we can get so stuck in that mode of analytical searching for solutions to problems that we ‘can’t find the exit door’, and this self-entrapment in analytical mode can move from the ‘helpful tool’ stage to become a form of psychosis.

Clearly, access to our ability to shift our mind from one mode to another is important, yet it is not uncommon, among WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS, to ‘get stuck’ in analytical mode without being able to ‘find the door out’ that can lead us to other sensory modes such as our non-analytical (relational) ‘sensory-motor rhythm’ mode, which has been described in terms of the feelings one gets as one’s entire body is outside-inwardly orchestrated in its movement of serving the ball in tennis where the falling ball is inductively shaping one’s movements, a movement very unlike the inside-outward directed movement of a goose-stepping soldier.

It is evident that we are capable of BOTH giving up directive control of our actions to the continually unfolding relational dynamics we are situationally included in, or taking control of our own actions and directing them from our own interior regardless of the environmental dynamics we are situationally included in.  We can march into the raging ocean or be an obedient member in the Charge of the Light Brigade if the discipline of our intellectualizing mind is strong enough to over-ride our natural senses that would orient our movements in the direction of lesser to greater relational harmony.  For the well-trained soldiers of the light brigade, intellectual instructions came before ambient sensory-relational orientating influences, although less disciplined groups might have opted for ‘every man for himself’!

Before we ‘lose it’ in this continuing discussion, there is salient issue here of TOPOLOGY which is very much tied up in the EAST versus WEST difference in understanding ‘reality’ as in involved in the CRAZY-MAKING influence of WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENCE.  I am adding the word ADHERENCE since not everyone who lives within a WESTERN CULTURE is an ADHERENT of common WESTERN CULTURE beliefs and practices.  In the terminology of ADVAITA VEDANTA we have the terms Mahavit and Atmavit, the former referring to someone who has a ‘different understanding’ but follows the popular protocol and the latter referring to someone who not only has a ‘different understanding’ but ‘walks the talk’.

The centrol focus of this discussion is TOPOLOGY and what it does for, or to, our ‘understanding’.  If you employ the word GROWTH, I will suggest to you that this word is without meaning in the reality of our actual sensory experience of inclusion in the transforming relational continuum.  That is, ‘GROWTH’ is an abstraction that requires a notional FIXED REFERENCE FRAME, and without that fixed reference frame, as in the relational reality of our actual sensory experience, there can only be TRANSFORMATION.

As mentioned, we may say ‘the town is growing larger’ but that would only ‘make sense’ is the town were on a flat plane of infinite extent and could be treated as an ‘independently-existing thing-in-itself’.  Since, in the reality of our ACTUAL SENSORY EXPERIENCE, all towns are like FIGURES-in-GROUND wherein FIGURE AND GROUND must be understood using BOTH/AND logic of the INCLUDED MEDIUM.  One can think of this in terms of the boil in flow where the distinction between ‘boil’ and ‘flow’ is PURELY APPEARANCE.  However, language and grammar wise, we tend to talk about such FIGURE and GROUND relations using the EITHER/OR logic of the EXCLUDED MEDIUM wherein we regard FIGURE and GROUND as two different, independently-existing things-in-themselves.

So, … with that distinction in mind, how would you understand the ‘town that is growing larger’?  That is, … does the term ‘growing’ make sense?  It is INCOMPLETE since it fails to acknowledge that the surrounding non-town area is shrinking by the same amount that the town is ‘growing’ in which case what is really going on is RELATIONAL TRANSFORMATION, and NOT GROWTH.   ‘GROWTH IS ABSTRACTION’ that implies that what is ‘growing’ resides in an absolute containing space that is not involved in the ‘GROWTH’ dynamic.

How many times have we WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS used the word-concept GROWTH as if it were something ‘real’?  How about ‘the growth of the economy’?  Is that ‘raal’?  Or is it all about ‘transformation’?

If we get it wrong, we are screwing with ‘reailty’.

AND YES, WE … “WESTERN CULTURE ADERHENTS” … ARE GETTING IT WRONG AND THIS IS A CRAZY-MAKER.

Now we can look back at the narrative of the psychologist using the removal of blue paint from a white hardboard to liberate the imagery of ‘clouds’ within the ‘negative space’ of the non-blue.  This gives us understanding by way of ‘transformation’ of the overall scene rather than directly and explicitly creating the cloud as a ‘figure’ in the ‘ground’.  In other words, in our blue-paint removing approach, FIGURE AND GROUND ARE ONE.

This is important because it is taking us back to TOPOLOGY which is a form of understanding that we are born with but which is, in WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENCE, trained out of us so that we shift our focus to ‘figures’ or ‘objects’ and ‘what they do’ so that we can no longer ‘see’ the whole transforming reality.  Modern physics reminds us that the transforming relational continuum IS THE REALITY while the selected subjects that we abstractly animate with the double error of language and grammar is a psychological PSEUDO-REALITY.

There is no ‘town’ that is ‘growing larger’ and occupying more of the countryside, there is only the transforming land that includes town and country; i.e. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS “GROWTH”.

“The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist.” – Erwin Schroedinger

How did we WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS get our minds so twisted up that we put into an unnatural precedence in our ‘reality constructing’, THINGS IN THEMSELVES, with the capacity of GROWTH?

WHY DID WE LAY THIS MISCONCEPTION CALLED GROWTH ON OUR CHILDREN?  It is a CRAZY-MAKER that has the psyche splitting our ‘self’ (as if it were a name-instantiated thing-in-itself) out of the transforming relational continuum and re-animating it with notional (grammar-given) powers of sourcing actions and developments.

THIS PUTS US BACK TO THE PICTURE OF THE ‘FIGURE’ AS INDEPENDENT OF THE ‘GROUND’.  This is where the abstract concept of absolute Cartesian space comes from; i.e. it is an abstraction that had to be invented once we psychologically separated out the FIGURES from the GROUND and represented them by way of the double error of language and grammar (Nietzsche), the first error is ‘naming’ that imputes independent existence to relational forms in the flow, and the second error of grammar conflates the first by imputing to the name-instantiated thing-in-itself, ‘its own powers of sourcing actions and developments’.

The psychological exercise with wiping blue paint from a white-board delivers figure and ground as ONE where the distinction is purely relational as in the town in the country where the REALITY is not that ‘the town is growing larger’ as we WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS SAY IT IS, and thus impute the REALITY of ‘GROWTH’ of NAME-INSTANTIATED THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES, .. THE DOUBLE ERROR OF LANGUAGE AND GRAMMAR.

NO, THE REALITY OF OUR ACTUAL SENSORY EXPERIENCE IS THAT THERE IS ONLY RELATIONAL TRANSFORMATION, … THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS GROWTH.

Of course, this marks the distinction wherein EAST IS EAST AND WEST IS WEST AND NEVER THE TWAIN SHALL MEET (Rudyard Kipling).

In the EAST, there is only transformation and that is why, when modern physics finally came to this same conclusion, it ‘clicked’ in the psyche of modern physics researcher David Bohm and others, who had foreseen the need to design a flow-based language, that the EAST (e.g. indigenous aboriginals) had already come to this conclusion (everything is in flux) and had developed such a language.

“A few months before his death, Bohm met with a number of Algonkian speakers and was struck by the perfect bridge between their language and worldview and his own exploratory philosophy. What to Bohm had been major breakthroughs in human thought — quantum theory, relativity, his implicate order and rheomode – were part of the everyday life and speech of the Blackfoot, Mic Maq, Cree and Ojibwaj.” – F. David Peat, ‘Blackfoot Physics’

 

SUMMARY:

The reality of our actual sensory experience is of inclusion in the transforming relational continuum aka the Tao aka the Wave-field in which we and all relational forms are included.

TOPOLOGICALLY, we are not separate from the all-inclusive flow in which we and everything is included.  This is why the topological ‘game’ of creating imagery by removal of  blue colour from a white foundational base.  The images are of white clouds; i.e. they are images that appear to be of positive (things-in-themselves) features even though they arise from what is NOT THERE.   This recalls Wittgenstein’s observation that “we must approach the surface of truth from the direction of what is obviously not true moving in the direction of ‘what is not so obviously not true’.

One can use this context to avoid the concept of GROWTH of name-instantiated TOWN-thing-in-itself in observing transformation in the valley.  If we  are continually monitoring what is going on starting  by identifying ‘developments’ in the countryside, moving from what is obviously not developed in the direction of what is not so obviously not developed, we never lose consciousness of the overall countryside within the town is a developing.  In this view, the shrinking of the undeveloped countryside (reciprocal to the developing town) is what comes first to mind.  There is a sense of ‘loss’ by way of transformation of the virgin condition of the land which is reciprocal to the sense of ‘growth’ of the developed area’.  Whether we end up opting to understand what is going on as ‘loss of virgin area’ or ‘growth of developed area’ depends on our observer values that we bring with us in our observing.

As an indigenous aboriginal, we may see what is going on as ‘the LOSS and SHRINKAGE of natural virgin area’ and as a prod-development colonizer, we may see what is going on at the ‘growth’ of development.

BUT THERE IS SOMETHING MISSING IN THE ‘GROWTH OF DEVELOPMENT’ VIEW, unless we thought that what was going on here was going on in a flat plane of infinite extent in which case it would be ‘logical’ to speak in terms of GROWTH without having to mention reciprocal SHRINKAGE and LOSS.

As far as our language and grammar goes, it gives us a free hand to speak in terms of GROWTH as if that were ‘reality’ while it becomes far more difficult to express in language, relational transformation, which is what is actually (experientially rather than intellectually) going on.

NONLOCAL RELATIONAL TRANSFORMATION IS OUR EXPERIENCE-BASED REALITY WHILE ‘GROWTH’ OF ‘LOCAL’ THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES IS LANGUAGE AND GRAMMAR BASED ABSTRACTION DERIVING FROM THE ‘DOUBLE ERROR OF LANGUAGE AND GRAMMAR’.

IN THE TOPOLOGICAL VIEW, FIGURE AND GROUND ARE ONE AS US CONSISTENT WITH OUR EXPERIENCE; I.E. TOWN AND COUNTRY AS FIGURE AND GROUND ARE ONE.  LANGUAGE THAT IMPUTES ‘GROWTH’ TO THE ‘TOWN’ WITHOUT AT THE SAME TIME ACKNOWLEDGING SHRINKAGE OF UNDEVELOPED COUNTRY IS UNREAL ABSTRACTION WHICH CONCEALS THE REALITY WHICH IS RELATIONAL TRANSFORMATION.

Among WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS, the ‘double error’ is a crazy-maker which not only CONCEALS REALITY but introduces a surrogate reality which WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS employ as our ‘operative reality’.

This is where ‘sorcery’ comes into play.

And in India, as in Greece, the same mistake was made: “We must once have been at home in a higher world (instead of a very much lower one, which would have been the truth); we must have been divine, for we have REASON!” Indeed, nothing has yet possessed a more naive power of persuasion than the error concerning being, as it has been formulated by the Eleatics, for example. After all, every word and every sentence we say speak in its favor. Even the opponents of the Eleatics still succumbed to the seduction of their concept of being: Democritus, among others, when he invented his atom. “REASON” in language–oh, what an old deceptive female she is! I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.

 

CONCLUSION:

We WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS MAKE OURSELVES INTO ‘CRAZIES’ by using language and grammar to construct an ABSTRACT pseudo-reality for ourselves to ‘live in’ that is a radical departure from the reality of our sensory experience.

For example, we think of ourselves as GROWING UP from newborn babies that we understand as ‘things-in-ourselves’, ignoring the reality of the Tao wherein mitakuye oyasin (all things are related) as in a wave-field continuum) is what actually prevails in the reality of our sensory experience.

BUT AS MODERN PHYSICS REMINDS US, as well as the indigenous aboriginal cultures, Buddhism/Taoism and Advaita Vedanta, we are all inclusions with the transforming relational continuum.

What about all these stories we WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS share wherein we cast ourselves as name-instantiated, independently-existing things-in-ourselves (we call ‘human beings’) notional with our own powers of action and development, … as the ‘double error of language and grammar facilitates?

IS IT POSSIBLE THAT THE WHOLE GREAT COMPLEX OF WESTERN CIIVILIZATION IS AN IMAGINARY LANGUAGE AND GRAMMAR CONSTRUCTED SCAM?  IS THIS WHAT I AM SAYING?

YES!

READ NIETZSCHE’S LIPS!  READ BOHM AND SCHROEDINGER’S LIPS. READ THE FOLLOWING STATEMENT REPEATED FROM ABOVE;

“A few months before his death, Bohm met with a number of Algonkian speakers and was struck by the perfect bridge between their language and worldview and his own exploratory philosophy. What to Bohm had been major breakthroughs in human thought — quantum theory, relativity, his implicate order and rheomode – were part of the everyday life and speech of the Blackfoot, Mic Maq, Cree and Ojibwaj.” – F. David Peat, ‘Blackfoot Physics’

WHY DON’T THE MAJOR IMPLICATIONS OF THIS STATEMENT?

-1- THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS ‘GROWTH’.  As embryos and then infants, we do not suddenly COME INTO BEING as ‘independent things-in-ourselves’.  We are never ‘split out’ as an INHABITANT that lives his ‘post-birth’ life in a separate HABITAT.  There is no INHABITANT-HABITAT split; … that is a BINARY ABSTRACTION.

As in fluid flow, forms can boil up and become manifest and again be subsumed within the flow WITHOUT EVER NOT BEING “OF THE FLOW” aka the Tao aka the Wavefield.

As in a field or fluid-flow continuum, forms that emerge and are subsumed are how flow manifests.  We impute ‘thing-in-itself being’ to them by ‘naming’ them.  ‘Names’ persist even though the universe is a transforming relational continuum withing which forms are continually manifesting.

‘GROWTH’ is a backhanded way of imputing BEING.   IF WE ACCEPTED REALITY AS ‘the Tao’; i.e. as THE TRANSFORMING RELATIONAL CONTINUUM, then there would be no need for the concept of ‘INDEPENDENTLY-TEXISTING THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES’ AKA ‘BEINGS’, and thus there would no need for the concept of GROWTH, nor would there be any need for the concept of LOCAL since a transforming relational continuum aka ‘Wavefield’ is inherently NONLOCAL.

-2- IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO SPEAK EXPLICITLY ABOUT RELATIONAL TRANSFORMATION SINCE IT IS INHERENTLY NONLOCAL.  IN OTHER WORDS, NONLOCAL DYNAMICS  (‘THE TAO’) ARE INHERENTLY INEFFABLE.

“The Tao that can be told is not the true Tao’ – Lao Tzu

What we can speak explicitly about is NOT the Tao, but reduction of the Tao.  For example nonlocal resonance manifests as DUNING which is a NONLOCAL dynamic.  About all we can say about ‘duning’ is ‘there is duning’ or ‘duning is a phenomenon that manifests within the transforming relational continuum.  Duning is one way in which transformation manifests and transformation is NONLOCAL

-3- SPEAKING EXPLICITLY about the INEFFABLE TAO  is clearly very valuable for expanding our deepening our understanding of reality through language based sharing of experience; i.e. sharing of REDUCED IMPRESSIONS OF OUR EXPERIENCE since experience of inclusion in the Tao, ‘the ineffable Tao that cannot be told’.

While language is NOT capable of articulating our experiencing of inclusion in the Tao, language is capable of sharing a reduced VISUAL IMPRESSION of secondary manifestations of the Tao (the Wavefield, the transforming relational continuum).  Thus language lets us talk in local terms of ‘DUNES’ even though ‘DUNING’ is resonance and resonance is NONLOCAL in space-time.  Language and grammar let us ‘name’ local forms, … forms which are visible FEATURES of the transforming relational continuum, and ‘namiing’ reduces a transient image to a non-transient thing-in-itself (non-transient thing-in-itself in the intellect only).  Grammar allows us to conflate this first error of naming-to-impute-being, with the second error of grammar that imputes the power of sourcing actions and development to the name-instantiated thing-in-itself (first error).

We have now OVERCOME NONLOCALITY by using language and grammar to invent a LOCAL thing-in-itself (‘the DUNE’) with ‘it’s own’ (grammar give) powers of sourcing actions and developments.

Thanks to this double error of language and grammar, we have overcome, at least in the abstracting intellect, the NONLOCALITY of the Tao that has been constraining the effability of reality, and we know have effable SURROGATE REALITY; i.e. a reduced SUBSTITUTE REALITY wherein LOCAL things-in-themselves we are calling DUNES substitutes for the NONLOCAL DUNING aka aka resonance aka Wave-dynamic.

While the EAST is content with using this double error based reduction as a rough ‘go-by’ or Wittgenstein ladder’, which is useful for INFERRING an ineffable reality that lies innately beyond the inference, the WEST has let the surrogate pseudo-reality constructed with the double error tool, to serve as THE SUBSTITUTE REALITY.  Thus, if a WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENT speaks of  dunes or humans growing larger and moving this way and that, she is not speaking of holodynamical forms in the Wavefield aka Tao, … she is speaking of what she and WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS IN GENERAL are accepting as their OPERATIVE REALITY.

PERSONAL SYNOPSIS:

I no longer consider myself a WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENT, but because we speak the common language we do, I will still say to you; “my grandson is growing larger and taller and is moving about the house”. Meanwhile, I am thinking ‘mitakuye oyasin’, we are all related and life is like a holodynamic; i.e. we all share inclusion in a transforming relational continuum.  If you remain a believer in the ‘double error’; i.e. a believer in the existence of name-instantiated things-in-themselves with their own powers of sourcing actions and development, then this constitutes a major difference in our respective understandings of reality.  How might this show up?

My understanding of reality is very much like John and Yoko’s as expressed in ‘Imagine’.  I don’t believe in ‘sorcery’ thus I don’t believe in the Western ‘producer-product myth’ (it is the double error).  I don’t believe in countries or corporations or any supposed name-instantiated ‘independently-existing’ things-in-themselves with notional powers of sourcing actions and developments.   That is, I understand the world as an all-including, transforming relational continuum as elaborated on by Nietzsche, Bohm, Schroedinger and Indigenous aboriginal elders.   I am less familiar with Tuddhist/Taoist and Advaita Vedanta beliefs, but the impression I have at this point is that I am also of the same general understanding.

Topological meditations a la those of F. David Peat and David Bohm open up our understanding to the BOTH/AND ‘quantum’ logic of the INCLUDED MEDIUM where FIGURE and GROUND are ONE.  It is clear that we are socio-culturally “locking ourselves in by high switching costs” to ‘REASON’ based on EITHER/OR logic of the EXCLUDED MEDIUM and that the costs of NOT switching are continually rising.  The metaphor of ‘never the twain shall meet’ in referring to the EAST – WEST divide is too strong.  As with plate tectonics, this transformation is underway even if it is manifesting as a punctuated disequilbrium.

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